Setting up a production environment

There are a few things you'll want to do with your application before moving into production.

See the Bootstrap page in the docs.
This covers most of the global settings that would change between environments.
As a general rule, you should enable caching and disable profiling (Kohana::init settings) for production sites.
Route::cache can also help if you have a lot of routes.

Turn on APC or some kind of opcode caching.
This is the single easiest performance boost you can make to PHP itself. The more complex your application, the bigger the benefit of using opcode caching.